Posts by mark jacobs

Microsoft Task Manager now tasking PCs with running multiple copies of itself

Another Windows 11 horror - good old NotePad. Now it is multi-tabbed and remembers all the files you've had open. If you don't close the tab, it'll be there next time you open NotePad. Seems like a good idea, until you realise that Windows holds each of those files in the tabs open in read-deny-write mode, so that you can't overwrite any of those files while NotePad is open! Text editors are supposed to open and read the file and then close it. Good ones monitor the file for changes while it is opened in the editor, and warns you if something else has changed it. Bad ones hold the file open so it can't be writtent to until you close the tab or the editor.

Tech giants set to pay through the nose for nuclear power that's still years away

The Elephant in the Room

We should not be proliferating nuclear power stations. We should not be paying wind farms to switch off their turbines. What the heck is wrong with everyone? Think of the future and what we're going to do with a load of nuclear waste, just to get a load of rehashed rubbish from AI searches.

WinAmp's woes will pass, but its wonders will be here forever

The good ol' days

A good player was the old version of Winamp before it went mad. Here is version 2.90 lite (540K Zip), a much saner release.

https://www.jacobsm.com/winamp290_lite.zip

FYI: If you're running HP Device Manager, anyone on your network can get admin on your server via backdoor

How can you tell if you're affected?

How do you know if a PC is running HP Device Manager?

Interpol: Strong encryption helps online predators. Build backdoors

They're so worried about "child predators" when half the government and royalty are at it! What a bunch of baloney. My advice is encrypt things your own way, so that only you and the people you allow, can decipher your messages.

Now you can officially dox Scrabble players, thanks to the new dictionary definitions

I've got one word to say to you ..

.. QUETZALS spanning two triple word scores, with the T already on the board! Neh neh!

HSBC now stands for Hapless Security, Became Compromised: Thousands of customer files snatched by crims

If https is enforced and passwords stored as salted sha256 hashes, then how did these thieves get anything useful from the leak? It seems as though HSBC weren't following best practices in security.

Microsoft yanks the document-destroying Windows 10 October 2018 Update

Re: Not Cloudy Here

So, have you dared tried to update?

Don't install our buggy Windows 10 Creators Update, begs Microsoft

Re: The Spying Lie

So, remove the CPU. That should get rid of those pesky messages! ;-)

Re: Help!

Thanks for that, Carl. However, it only contains 2 icons when displayed as small icons, and when displayed as normal, most categories have nothing in them! They have removed most of its functionality!

Help!

I have got the update and now I cannot find the old control panel (it used to be on the right-click menu of the Start button). Any ideas where it has gone? I don't like the new "Settings" app.

Thai bloke battles jumbo python in toilet todger thriller

Spam email

"There's a new way to extend your dong ... try our pythons ..."

BT Yahoo! customers: Why! can't! we! grrr! delete! our! webmail! accounts!?

We are being fobbed off here.

Corporations are being treated more and more like people with rights, everyday! Now, we must excuse bosom buddies BT and Yahoo their foibles, because of some unknown reason that they can't get their act together. End of September is a promise, and the corporations broke that promise, but we must excuse them, for they are only "human". This society is sick because of the way corporations are treated, quite often, as more important than any one person. Money causes people to do things their consciences wouldn't normally let them do. Ripping off millions of customers is just one of those things. Betraying their confidence is another.

Smell burning? Samsung’s 'Death Note 7' could still cause a contagion

My son has the Huawei P9 and that is a lovely phone, reliable, hard-wearing, fast, best dual Leica camera in the world ... Huawei could easily take on Samsung's business.

Windows 10 market share fell in September

I got Windows 10 about 5 months ago (free upgrade from Windows 7 and 8), and I reckon Microsoft have taken one step forwards and 2 steps back with this release. Win10 still has the age old bugs that plagued 7 and 8. But it has accrued new ones. For example, bring up a file open dialog, and use the mouse to click on the pull-down arrow for the "Look in" list (to jump to a different drive or directory). The first time you use it, the drop-down folds back up again, necessitating another click to get it to drop down and stay dropped down! Horrible! And just this morning, I signed into an office PC running Win10, and when I eventually got a desktop, after its "Hi! Getting things ready" shenanigans, the Start button did nothing, no menu, nothing. Win key also did nothing. I had to right-click the Start button to get out! It seems behind every great product is a genius, and when he/she moves on, the product starts to fall to pieces (Apple - Jobs, Microsoft - Gates, Delphi - Hejlsberg).

Your 'intimate personal massager' – cough – is spying on you

Urgent! Help needed!

I am doing some in depth research on these devices and was wondering if there were any women aged 18 to 35 who would be willing to help me out... Enjoyment of sex would be a positive...

Farewell to Borland C++: Embarcadero releases Delphi and C++ Builder 10

Re: Remember when software came as a package

I still have a PC magazine cover CD that has a full version of Delphi 1 on it! 16-bit Windows development - something we should all be forced to experience. "What? You have a string LONGER than 255 characters!?!" ;-)

You've seen things people wouldn't believe – so tell us your programming horrors

BBC B Micro days...

I wrote a BBC Basic program to write random values between 0 and 255 to random memory locations in the machine's whole address space. This meant it clobbered code and data areas with impunity, and quite slowly. It was interesting to see how the machine slowly crashed, until I demonstrated it to a colleague. I had just helped him finish a spreadsheet which was now stored on a floppy in the machine. I ran my clobber program and the smiles were wiped off our faces as the disk drive activated and rendered the disk unusable! Laugh? No, we didn't.

How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript

Re: Left padding

function leftpad(str,len,ch)

{

var s1='                                                ';

var s2='0000000000000000000000000000000000000000';

if (ch) if (ch=='0') return s2.substr(0,len-str.length)+str;

return s1.substr(0,len-str.length)+str;

}

et voilà!

FBI backs down against Apple: Feds may be able to crack killer's iPhone without iGiant's help

The brutes!

"An external forensics company, with hardware capabilities, is likely copying the NAND storage off the [iPhone's chipset] and frequently recopying it back to the device in order to brute force the PIN..."

That's why the FBI have asked to postpone until April - to give them time to brute force the PIN.

Compare this (fiasco) with that in Paris, where the attackers just used unencrypted comms through unencrypted phones bought for use on the day and disposed of immediately after. They even hoiked phones off their victims and used them for some of their calls.

Which goes to prove that breaking encryption has nothing to do with stopping terrorism.

'A word processor so simple my PA could use it': Joyce turns 30

Them's were the days ...

I programmed a stock control system in LocoScript - very hard work! Yes, we could write books in those days. Nowadays, if you tried to write a book on Windows 10 with Word 365, you'd be hard-pressed to have a stable system past 150 pages! And Clippy would be right getting on your nerves!

Manchester fuzz 'truly sorry' for 'accidentally' hacking phone of whistleblower cop's girlf

It's not just GMP. The Met are also awful.

Shortly after the Stephen Lawrence murder, someone went into the police station supposedly investigating the matter, and handed them a hand-written list of likely suspects (from "word on the street"), and the station officer who took the paper it was written on, screwed it into a ball and chucked it into the waste paper basket. That typifies the attitude of the police force we pay council tax for. The murder of Charles De Menezes was filmed on camera phone by someone on the station platform where it happened. Several police officers got on-board the carriage where Charles was (and he did NOT have a backpack on, just T-shirt and jeans), they pinned him down to the floor with their weight, and fired 11 rounds into his head. WTF!?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7nL0A6ASM

Police = FAIL. Who polices the police? The police!

Why Nobody Should Ever Search The Ashley Madison Data

If it feels good, it is denied, until some desperation makes it available for a fee.

Bloke clicks GitHub 'commit' button in Visual Studio, gets slapped with $6,500 AWS bill

For source code, only use home-spun software (after all, you are a developer) and always put it on a VPN, and never a public server. If I want to see my own source code and I'm in Lesotho, I have to RDP to my VPN first. Without that first step, I can't get near it. Git is a bad idea and AWS is a toy. Don't trust third parties with commercial interests. Trust third parties with technical interests.

Swiss watch: Cuckoo-clock cops threaten Win 10 whup-ass can pop

Re: Obfuscation is the name of the game

Here's how. Make a batch file with these commands and run it :-

rem BLOCK WINDOWS 10 TELEMETRY BATCH COMMANDS

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DataCollection\ /v AllowTelemetry /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\DataCollection\ /v AllowTelemetry /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

sc config DiagTrack start=disabled

sc config dmwappushservice start=disabled

sc stop DiagTrack

sc stop dmwappushservice

Microsoft replaces Windows 10 patch update, isn't saying why

"their London HQ is less than 100 yards from a pub"

Most places in London are only 100 yards away from a pub. It's F.A.B. (flaming alcoholic Britain!)

Back to the subject at hand, M$ are, naturally, going to appear glibly apathetic as to the quibbles we bestow upon them, since they know that all PCs will eventually be running Windows 10 as hardware is replaced. Their spyware will slowly become ubiquitous, and Orwell's prediction will come true.

Google translate this : http://aeronet.cz/news/analyza-windows-10-ve-svem-principu-jde-o-pouhy-terminal-na-sber-informaci-o-uzivateli-jeho-prstech-ocich-a-hlasu/

Re: Am I particularly unobservant...?

You asked for Wireshark logs, well have a look at http://localghost.org/posts/a-traffic-analysis-of-windows-10

Re: Those of us who haven't "upgraded"

@Def,

To quote Kevin Bennett from Facebook :-

Windows 10 every. single. thing. you. do, every keystroke, every word spoken in front of your mike, even your webcam, is recorded and sent back to MSFT. You might as well mount a camera and just send the stream to MSFT (and anybody that gives MSFT a buck for the footage) as that is EXACTLY what is happening if you take Windows 10..

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/

http://betanews.com/2015/07/31/the-real-price-of-windows-10-is-your-privacy/

http://localghost.org/posts/a-traffic-analysis-of-windows-10

Please note the last one where they did and in depth traffic analysis of a Windows 10 PC AFTER they "turned off" all of the switches under privacy AND turned off Cortana, result? It STILL sent everything you did to the MSFT servers. Sorry but if you don't want to broadcast everything you do to the world, or if you are a business with sensitive info? this OS should be treated no diofferently than malware. Stick with 7 or 8, avoid 10.

End quote. So, next time you're onanating in front of your webcam to some porn, smile for the camera! It's in the EULA that they can watch you doing that, and you're agreeing to it!

Microsoft's Windows 10 build list snowballs for Lumia mobes

Re: OK with me.

I am really starting to have my doubts about Windows 8.1 after a year or 2's usage. IE11 can still bring it (and the mouse pointer!) to a stand-still. Sometimes, stuff that would work faultlessly every time in XP or &, will fail inexplicably under 8.1, and then run fine when re-run. I trust Win8.1 less than I trust 7. And I trust 7 less than I trust XP. With Win10 patching itself as you run it, I am less prone to trust it at all!

Microsoft announces Windows 10 and Azure for humanity's implacable IoT foes

The "Internet of Things" is going to comprise of things their current architecture would have to be rewritten to use, in the future. Things that we haven't imagined yet. So, we are still going to be paying for Windows 11, 12, 13, ...

FREAKing hell: ALL Windows versions vulnerable to SSL snoop

Re: A different Freak?

Opera 27.0.1689.76 is NOT vulnerable under Windows 8.1 64-bit Pro.

IE11 IS vulnerable under Windows 8.1 64-bit Pro.

** WARNING **, it is still not safe to do your banking using IE, unless you are banking with one of the very few banks that have enforced the more modern ciphers on their servers.

Super SSD tech: Fancy a bonkers 8TB all-flash PC?

Re: Compare these to the 20MB MFM drives of not so long ago!

I run Windows 8.1 Professional on it. The reason that there is so much free space is because I had to wipe the drive and restore from an OS DVD with absolutely no foistware on it at all, just the bare OS. 'Kin A! Mean and lean is how I like to run things. Crude and rude.

What's nice about a small capacity SSD boot drive, is that I can easily and quickly switch the PC on to check something out on t'Internet, or some code I've written, and get to what I need in under 20 seconds. Browser load from cold start is pretty much immediate on an i7. Almost like instant-on. From sleep, it is instant-on!

Compare these to the 20MB MFM drives of not so long ago!

I have been running a 128GB Samsung 840EVO SSD (with the relevant firmware patch) for 9 months now. The OS is on it so it gets plenty of reads and writes every day. It is always blisteringly fast, and I am still surprised at its speed even after 9 months of its unfailing alacrity. I still have over 90GB free, despite putting all my apps on it (my data goes on a standard 7200 rpm 500GB SATA 3 hard disk). It's not the transfer speeds (read and write) that get me, but the access times being in microseconds instead of milliseconds. Sometimes, it seems to have done what you wanted before you've even pressed "Enter"! This Novachips 8TB 1.8GB/s drive will probably become the norm, and drive speeds will start to tax the i7 processors we currently run at 4.4GHz! Wicked!

Firefox 36 swats bugs, adds HTTP2 and gets certifiably serious

Re: Problems with XP?

Totally agree with you about Opera and Firefox. I also had the same gripes about Chrome and its awful propensity to hook you up to all and sundry just because you're registered. Opera seems the least of all evils ATM! Safari is too crashy.

Boffins baffled by the glowing 'plumes' of MARS

I don't get it... ?

This happened nearly 4 years ago. Why are we only just hearing about it now?

Microsoft's patchwork falls apart … AGAIN!

I am getting my coat...

... Windows 10 is around the corner, and that patches the OS in real-time! Yikes! For example, working on a 300 page Word document for 3 hrs, and then hitting "Save", and watch as the patch to Word delivered at 2 hours in, renders the document unusable!

ATTENTION SETI scientists! It's TOO LATE: ALIENS will ATTACK in 2049

Ha ha ha!

That was brilliant! Those poor aliens!

Virgin Media to splurge BEELLIONS on UK network infrastructure expansion

Honestly?

I left Virgin last year, when my 5th "megahub" blew up on me (completely dead). These substandard devices, cheaply made in the far east, always seemed to go wrong on me, so I moved to Plus Net. Not only did I get consistently fast speeds (downloads 3 to 3.5 MBytes per second, 1 to 2 MBytes per second uploads) throughout the day, evening and night, but their support was more personal and immediate. I'd move to them or One 2 One, and stick a finger up to Branson and his drug-fuelled island of depravity that he owns!

Over 50? Out of work? Watch out because IT is about to eat itself

How to confuse AI and natural language analysis programs

Just write something like :-

"It's not as if this is the wrong answer ..."

AI thinks "this is the wrong answer" ...

Don't count on antivirus software alone to keep your data safe

Re: An example ?

"With drive-by infections, it is enough to simply visit a website to infect a computer with malware. Visitors don't need to start a download or install anything - the website does this automatically!"

My browser will not automatically download anything, without asking me where it should save it first. What kind of browser are you using that would do this? An idiotic one by the sound of it.

"Yet If a browser has a relevant safety gap, such scripts can access a user's computer directly. This therefore enables malware to move from the server to the browser, and via the security gap to the user's computer, without any conscious action by the website visitor at all."

Again, it's a problem with the browser, and you should change your browser.

The reason I mentioned ActiveX is because that is the biggest hole in your browser, then comes Java (I do not allow this to run), then Flash (run with permission). That leaves JavaScript with Ajax or other call-to-the-server methodologies, which can only write to the web page, open new web pages, or write to cookies. None of those compromise a PC.

JavaScript and HTML are not capable of infecting your PC. Buggy browsers, ActiveX, Java and Flash, however, can. The article is talking about Javascript. Now, go back to sleep!

Re: An example ? @ Pascal Monett

If you cannot cite the offending Javascript/HTML code, then don't give me tripe!

When I read comments like, "they run the risk of being infected by rogue JavaScript running in the browser." I cringe. There is no way on planet Earth of infecting a machine by it running some JavaScript and HTML in a browser. The only thing JavaScript can write to, is cookies. This, again, is idiotic scare-mongering to attract readership. Granted, if somebody clicks on a link and runs whatever it leads to by acknowledging consent, then more fool them. But, on its own, with no clicking or acknowledgement, a website cannot infect a PC that prompts for any activeX to run. JavaScript can't - someone give me an example, if you think otherwise.

Facebook: Hey guys, come share all your securo-blunders with us!

Considering FB store your password in a server in Japan somewhere, and it keeps coming back to the browser as soon as you enter your username, no matter how you try to clear all stored passwords in Firefox, I will not be going near this tripe any time soon. FB users beware - your details and passwords are available to those who can pay enough. There is no security on FB. Close your accounts! You have been warned!

Microsoft explains Windows as a SERVICE – but one version remains a distant dream

Every time our Win XP office PCs updated Windows, they would all switch on the (crap and waste of time) Windows firewall, which I'd have to go round and switch off again (we already have Webroot protecting us). It sounds like Windows 10 is the death knell for all Windows versions.

We'll ask GCHQ to DELETE records of 'MILLIONS' of people – Privacy International

You can see how much the British public trust our "authorities" nowadays, from the comments above! Having constantly shown how untrustworthy they are in the past, how can such a claim be made that they really will delete your records? This is an idiotic article - and Privacy International are really wasting people's time and their own money.

It's 4K-ing big right now, but it's NOT going to save TV

TV is dead

I am spending more time on the computer and less time watching TV nowadays and wondered why. I believe it is to do with the number and frequency of adverts being too high, coupled with a drop in the quality of the content on TV. Plus, choosing your own entertainment is much better than being "programmed".

Nexus 7 fandroids tell of salty taste after sucking on Google's Lollipop

Re: Nexus 2012

Did you check the source code?

Windows 10's 'built-in keylogger'? Ha ha, says Microsoft – no, it just monitors your typing

Re: Key Strikes Yes - Letters NO

I suppose you can also see how useful it would be to be able to run an app that injects code into the memory space of another running app. And how useful it is to be able to patch the kernel so that low-level OS routines like writing to a file, can be hooked and redirected to your own code! Really, really useful! And extremely insecure for OS design! Let's face it - Windows is an extraordinarily badly designed (mainstream) OS. Like our (mainstream) democratic society - inordinately badly designed. Certain plants are illegal, but unmanned bomber drones aren't. You know what I mean...

Re: Class action law suit

There's nothing you can do, Dogged. Even when disconnected from the internet physically, Windows 10 uses the nearest unsecured wifi hotspot to get another connection. And, if your PC has no wifi adapter, it builds a "software only" version using secret kernel directives. You cannot and will not escape their jurisdiction! ;-)

James Bond's metal-toothed nemesis Richard Kiel dies at 74

What a shame!

For a man with octophallic terata, he never did find his octopussy!